The Latent Browser
Hallucinating the latent web since 2022
See one of the earliest demos here: https://twitter.com/flngr/status/1609616068057698304
Project status update (March 2024)
The Latent Browser is back after a year of hiatus!
By popular demand (see this or this thread) an effort has been made to upgrade it to the latest version of the dependencies (well, most of them), and fix the code to make it run again!
Note: It has been a long time since I've worked on this project, so a lot of things changed since then. I've had to migrate from Next 12 to Next 14, Webpack to Bun, davinci to GPT-4 etc.
It is still possible that some things are broken when you try it.
What is The Latent Browser
The Latent Browser is a desktop application designed like a web browser, which hallucinates web search results (the resultds are fictious and are generated by a LLM) and web pages.
Technology
The Latent Browser is a web application designed to run locally on your machine.
The app is 99% React, Tailwind, TypeScript, and NextJS. The runtime is Tauri, which is written in Rust (but the Latent Browser itself doesn't really use Rust).
March 2024 update: I never really had the time to package it as a standalone "drag & drop install" application (well actually I did try but there were some bugs, and then I started working on other projects).
Where can I get in touch / follow you?
I'm always working on various AI projects, so I've setup and Discord and all.
You can find more info by following my Linktree here: https://linktr.ee/FLNGR.
How to run it
For the moment you need to fetch the code and run it on your machine.
Prerequisites
Make sure you have installed the prerequisites for your OS:
curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash
curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
Running the latent borwser
Running the standalone app (recommended for users)
Running the app in Chrome (recommended for developers)
bun i bun next dev open http://localhost:3000
Packaging the Desktop app
To be continued (the app has been rebooted in March 2024, and most instructions are deprecated).
Note: The Latent Browser is using Tauri V2 but the doc isn't complete yet: https://beta.tauri.app/guides/build
Using the browser
Working (most of the time) examples
Here are some examples to get you started:
a back-office application to manage users. There is a table with editable cells, a button to add a new user, and a counter of users.a simulation of calculating PI by generating random dots inside a circle. The simulator should include a slider to adjust the speed, a reset button, and the current estimate of PI.a simple app to compute your BMI, using form inputs for age, height and weight (in kilos)a whack-a-mole game but with spiders, a css 3-per-3 grid, emojis, and JS codea clone of asteroid using <canvas>, the mouse should orient the spaceship, it should fire bullets when clicking, and bullets can destroy asteroids.website for a company selling time travel visit packages (great pyramids, Trojan wars..). The website features 3 polaroid pictures taken by tourists of those eras
Non-working examples
Those examples don't work yet.. maybe one day in text-davinci-004 or 005?
a 120 BPM drum machine made using tone.js, with a step sequencer made using html checkboxes, to indicate when to play. Each row should be a different instrument (kick, snare, hihat), 8 buttons per row. There is a button to start/stop.
FAQ
The UI/UX should be improved
I agree!
Uhh.. something went wrong
Try clicking again on generate 🎲
No I mean, something went REALLY wrong
Maybe you did too many requests to OpenAI?
I don't.. know?
Wait a bit then restart the application, eg. kill it from the terminal.
Message to hackers
After reworking on the app again in March 2024, I've noticed that there are now two new build options in Tauri: Android and iOS.
But ATM I haven't really looked into it.
If you are interested to explore this, here are the commands:
# init bun run tauri android init bun run tauri ios init # run bun run tauri android dev bun run tauri ios dev